User talk:Laldm

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Be Bold!

19:31, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Illinois Institute of Technology
Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm glad to see contributions to the IIT page, as I've put a ton of work into putting together a good structure for the page, and would love to have more people adding to the article.

I assume you were the anonymous editor from 12/26 as well, since your recent edits seem to follow those up. Just wanted to let you know that I edited them so that they would better flow with the article - the historical pieces need to go in their proper time period. Also, the information about IIT's neighborhood, while mostly correct for the latter period, was not for the early days. Most sources from the time put the neighborhood around Armour as fairly nice, especially if you consider the whole of the near South Side (i.e., from Roosevelt Road south to about Garfield, from the lake to the river). It's a big swath of land I know, and even now contains a very mixed bag with all the redevelopment going on, but again, most sources I've seen concerning Armour place it in at least a nice neighborhood, with the Chicago blues scene centered around State in the 1920s and 1930s - afluent or not, very historic. Last, the number I used for current architecture students is from the university's faculty financial report, available here. It lists 681 as the population of the College of Architecture for FY2006 (June 1, 2005 to May 31, 2006). I left your recent edit, but thought I would mention this - enrollment numbers are tough to quote at the beginning of the year with much accuracy, so those beginning of the year numbers tend to be on the optimistic side. - Duncanr 18:21, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

You hit the nail on the head when you say the decline started in the 1970s, but most of the public housing was in place by the 1960s or so. At least in my opinion, it wasn't the neighborhood that caused the decline, but it probably did accelerate it and definitely made the revitalization difficult in the beginning (mid-1990s). There were discussions about leaving the Mies campus behind - whether or not they were ever thought out or made it outside internal discussions until long after the fact, even the thought shows how bad things were. I have my thoughts on what really caused the decline of the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, and what has kept us from completely recovering (big hint: there was a big change at IIT in 1973, and it seems like things never were the same). The resurgence of Bronzeville has been critical in the resurgence of the university, but it won't do the trick by itself - its more or less helped bring the school back on even playing field with others, not above them like it used to be.

Going back further than the 1950s, though, gets very tricky. As you've probably already read/heard about, most of the Main Campus is built on pretty historic land - there are new markers on the new signs on State Street which tell some of the stories of the buildings that were leveled or had already been leveled by the time work started on Alumni, then Perlstein and Wishnick. There were a ton of jazz/blues clubs, many of which were quite popular and influential in their time. But "their time" is up for debate. Most of what I've read from IIT sources of the time has the same connotation as most of the IIT student sources from the mid-1990s, which often misses the historical point due to social, economic, and even racial undertones. We had influential people on the Land Clearance Commission, so clearing all this out was apparently no hard sell - it did backfire, though, as much of the housing projects were also built on this cleared land, though at the time these were portrayed as wonderful ways to cope with economic misfortune and such (and this is whole other discussion).

Overall the neighborhood seems to have gone through great swings - in the beginning, the church that Frank Gunsaulus ministered was attended by the Armour family and many others, plus Old Comiskey, the KAM Isaiah Synagouge (later the Pilgrim Baptist Church, which sadly burned Friday), and others were built by extremely afluent and extremely connected people. Gunsaulus taught at U of C, and got the Presidents of MIT and Harvard, not to mention President Howard Taft, to attend Armour's 20 year anniversary in 1913. Taft was in town for a fair or something I believe). It couldn't have been a bad neighborhood then.  The definition of the neighborhood, though, makes this tricky - I count Bronzeville primarily, and eastern Bridgeport, but you're right about the Stockyards being not too far away, and this area was pretty bad.  Chicago seems to have always had greatly different neighborhoods right next to each other (one historical rumor I've heard is that the expressways - Dan Ryan, Kennedy, and Stevenson - were built as divisions, and you can definitely see that now).  If you look at the old houses still standing on Michigan and Indiana Avenues, you'll see just how great a neighborhood it was (IIT's fraternities were initially housed in houses like these roughly were MSV now stands - they were amazing, but cadet housing during the war trashed them supposedly).  It looks like while Armour was in a very nice neighborhood from its founding until about the Great Depression, the Depression took a huge toll on the neighborhood (and the school - Lewis and Armour were close to bankruptcy when the merger occurred). World War II plus the merger plus Mies revitalized the school, which was able to keep going until around the mid-1970s (Vietnam, end of Cold War, and more internal struggles). Then, the current revitalization began with the razing of Stateway Gardens and construction of CPD headquarters on 35th, and the school followed (the Galvin-Pritzker gift, the National Comission, others).

So that's my version I guess. You can see how tough it is to accurately incorporate the neighborhood into the history of IIT without much care and a lot of writing. I'd love to have something added, though. I edited some of the stuff from your additions because of the complexities I talked about above. That's the fun about Wikipedia - it's not that I don't think the information should be in the article, but discussion could help bring some balance to it. Remember, history is often written by those who lived it, or those who won the battle, or those who talked to those who lived it, etc. IIT students haven't often had a positive or even neutral view of our neighborhood, and while there's been plenty of bad years (and things aren't stellar in some places still), there's still a ton of history here. It's also good to hear I'm not the only one fascinated by IIT's history - it really changed my perception of the school, and I keep finding cool things that happened way back when that no one seems to remember. - Duncanr 04:23, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Mies v. Rettaliata
Just a quick note - be careful about references to the departure of Mies in relation to President Rettaliata. Just about everything I've read paints a not-so-rosy portrait of their relationship, but virtually all of them come from third-party sources or people who were around at the time. No one has quotes it seems from either Mies or Rettaliata - but that will be changing soon. I did an interview with Rettaliata a couple weeks ago, and he said some interesting things about Mies in the discussion. So, while for now the story is Rettaliata didn't like Mies' shyness or didn't appreciate his style, Rettaliata's version of the story may soon be changing some minds. -Duncanr 18:08, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

IIT GA/R
I have nominated Illinois Institute of Technology for WP:GA/R due to inadequate referencing. I hope the article gets the attention it deserves during this process to retain its quality rating. Please see discussions at Good_article_review. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio/tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 17:09, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free media (Image:Iitlogo2-transp.gif)
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Nomination of List of Oklahoma school districts by county for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of Oklahoma school districts by county is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

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